Inbound Marketing + Recruitment = Big Impact

Knobelsdorff Electric Inc. (KEI) is a rapidly growing company based out of Goodhue and Eagan, MN and completes projects across the Midwestern states. With 30 years of experience and industry expertise, they operate primarily in the heavy industry arena, offering a one-stop shop for commercial and industrial electrical services and controls engineering to customers in industrial, automation & controls, high voltage, UL panel building, underground electrical, solar EPC, low voltage & fiber optic, commercial, residential, and professional services industries.

They are actively looking for Project Managers, Electrical Engineers, Journeymen, Controls Engineers, and Estimators … just to name a few. And according to President and CEO, Karl Von Knobelsdorff, they “need to hire them yesterday.” KEI simply has more jobs coming in than they can staff for. You could say this is a good problem, but from their company's perspective, turning away projects because you're understaffed is far from a good problem.

Karl Von Knobelsdorff was referred to Leighton Interactive by another one of our clients,Mead Metals. He had a very specific project in mind for us. He didn’t have questions about lead generation or increasing sales. Instead, he came to us with a different question …

How can inbound marketing help me get more job applicants and hire more employees?

So how do we take what we know about inbound marketing - think awareness, consideration, and decision stages, nurturing, content building, etc. - and apply it to HR and recruitment?

We think outside the box, and creatively apply our knowledge, that's how. This wasn’t our first rodeo with recruitment via inbound marketing, and we got right to work.

How did we do it? Let me walk you through it.

STEP ONE: Make the Website Do Some of the Work

The first task at hand was to make adjustments to the website. Right out of the gate we noted some opportunities for user experience improvement; more importantly, the current setup for accepting job applications online was not functioning properly. In other words, we did some very top-secret, dark voodoo magic (AKA design + development + inbound marketing) to get the website closer to where we wanted it to be.

PREVIOUS WEBSITE DESIGN UPDATED WEBSITE DESIGN

We also added a ‘quick apply’ button and form to the website so at the very least we could start recognizing any applications that might come in online. In the first six weeks of adding the Quick Apply option, we collected24applications.

STEP TWO: Persona Development

A foundational piece of inbound marketing is knowing who your audience is. Persona development was a crucial step in the process of inbound marketing for recruitment; we didn’t just want a massive amount of applicants, we wanted the right applicants … qualified applicants. So, we did our research. We looked into demographics, educational and licensing programs, interviewed employees, and worked to determine where “the perfect applicant” spends their time, gets information, and is influenced.

STEP THREE: Go Where the People Are

Our research didn’t stop with persona development. We have continued utilizing data to see what job sites are most popular and have the best ROI; we’re building content and crafting social messages to nurture contacts and setting up social and paid ads to target potential applicants.

KEI had no blog content prior to working with us, and they now have nearly 30 live blogs. The blog has brought an additional 1,566 views to the website and made a massive impact on traffic from organic search.

We manage their Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, and in the last six months, we published 120 posts on each platform, in addition to the daily, strategic interactions on behalf of KEI. With a 104 percent increase in likes, we’ve more than doubled the audience size on Facebook and grown the LinkedIn audience by over 30 percent.

BLOG PERFORMANCE

BLOG VIEWS

SOCIAL MEDIA PERFORMANCE

STEP FOUR: Make Application Easy + Accessible

As I mentioned, when we first dug into working with KEI, their online application wasn’t working. So as positions opened, we added individual application pages, in addition to the Quick Apply form. This allowed us to create content for each posting with specifications to that job and segment applications. We’ve chalked up 3,487 views to the job posting pages, and they're converting at eight percent.

To date, we’ve had over 350 applications from 275 contacts in six months. Of those, KEI has interviewed 30% of applicants. Now 30% may not sound like a lot, but in a highly technical field where a company is very selective (rightfully so) about their employees, we'll take 30% any day.

From our first month to our sixth, we saw:

160% increase in website sessions

1,280% increase in application contacts

While crunching numbers I silently asked myself, “I wonder how many people visit the site AND apply for a job?” 11. Eleven percent. Eleven percent of visitors to the KEI website apply for a job once they arrive. Their website is converting at eleven percent for their goal.

That’s impact.

STEP FIVE: Keep the Well-Oiled Machine Well-Oiled

And now, we're tasked with keeping the momentum rolling. We continue building landing pages and custom forms for the open positions, and analyzing what is and isn’t working with our current efforts. As we adjust social media, blogging, landing pages, follow up emails, and website dials for KEI, we continue to see success.

To date, KEI has hired10% of all interviewed applicants.

Those same inbound marketing tactics - content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, video, and branding - can be utilized for internal efforts, too. The power of inbound for recruitment is real, and KEI harnessed it.

The only way to go from here is up.

About The Author

A deep love of art and design drives me as I navigate the ever-changing waters of marketing. I am constantly looking for new and better ways to give the inbound marketing methodology the beautiful face it deserves. As the Art Director, I ensure that all of the design work we produce is top notch and designed with a purpose. When I’m not trying to solve creative problems, my life revolves around my family and friends, my passion for music, and my addiction to stories.